Sunday hackfest threatens websites

Internet security experts today warned that hackers plan to attack thousands of websites on Sunday in a six-hour point-scoring contest.

An intelligence report from mi2g, a digital risk management company, said the hackers plan to gain points depending on which operating system they attack: one point for Microsoft Windows, two points for Linux, Unix and BSD, three points for AIX, and five points for HP-Unix and MacOS. "This suggests that some hackers may specifically target Unix and MacOS systems to claim more points", the report read.

A website called www.defacers-challenge.com, listed the rules for hackers in broken English. The site was shut down early yesterday evening.

Home internet users who do not operate websites probably would not be affected directly, said Oliver Friedrichs, the senior manager for security response at Symantec.

mi2g executive chairman SK Matai said: "This bizarre and unwelcome hacker challenge on Sunday is unlikely to disrupt the internet as a whole. There may well be a range of ISPs and some prominent sites which come under heavy attack given that they would yield mass defacement targets or big bragging rights."

An early-warning network for the technology industry operating with the US department for homeland security, said it received "credible information" about the planned attacks and has already detected surveillance probes by hackers looking for weaknesses in corporate and government networks.

Chris Rouland, director of the X-force security team at Internet Security Systems, said researchers monitoring underground chat rooms and other internet activity had detected a drop in the numbers of vandalised websites recently and an increase in the types of surveillance scans that typically precede computer break-ins. "It's kind of a sandbagging period," said Rouland, who predicted that hackers were quietly breaking into computers and waiting to vandalise them on Sunday.

The purported "prize" for participating hackers was 500-megabytes of online storage space, which made little sense to computer experts. They said hackers capable of breaking into thousands of computers could easily steal that amount of storage on corporate networks.

A spokesman for the FBI said: "The FBI is taking this very seriously. Hacking is a crime and those who participate in this activity will be investigated and brought to justice."